Mass Effect

“With grim fatalism: twenty-two to twenty-six.”

None of them said anything then. What could be said? Yorrik watched the frost slowly fade from the medbay glass. It was warming up out there. Something was coming back on. Finally. He almost felt relieved, until he remembered how much better pathogens fared in hot climates. The batarian, however, was shivering.

“Why in the hell do you want to call it Fortinbras?” he said finally, his teeth chattering. “That’s a stupid name. I can barely pronounce it. It sounds human.”

“With great sorrow: Because, no matter what you do to save your family, Fortinbras always swarms in at the end and destroys it all.”

* * *

Jalosk Dal’Virra began to swell ten hours after entering the iso-chamber. His tears crusted over, clogging his tear ducts and coating his eyelids with angry, fouled scabs. The flesh around them bulged. His throat and chest filled with fluid, likely an edema—fluid where there should be no fluid. The batarian was drowning in his own skin. He screamed for the lights to be shut off, screamed that they were burning him, even though the medbay was no brighter than it had been for hours, a place of mostly shadows and dim blue emergency lighting. When this passed, he began to stare at the lights in awe, moving his hands over them as if in a trance.

“They’re so beautiful,” he whispered, and began to laugh softly. A giggle, really. A batarian. Giggling. “So beautiful. Like sapphires made of feelings. Can you see their feelings?”

Yorrik turned to Ysses for help, but the hanar still snoozed away. How long could a jellyfish sleep? The swelling seemed to be putting pressure on Jalosk’s already taxed brain. “Worried correction: They are running lights, and they do not have feelings.”

Jalosk rolled onto his back on the narrow cot, staring, dazzled. “I thought it would be different in Andromeda, Yorrik. I really did.”

“Perplexed query: You thought the lights in the Andromeda galaxy would have feelings?”

“No. I thought… everything would be different. Why would it be the same? It’s not a new planet. It’s not even a new system. It’s a whole galaxy. Why should it still be the Council races on top, and the rest of us scrabbling for scraps? Why should it not be all of everyone, equal, eating the same size slices of the same size pie? Why should people still hate batarians? Everyone gets a new slate. Me. I get a new slate. Grozik and Zofi get a new slate. Maybe in Andromeda people will think batarians are the enlightened, wise, sexually desirable ones, and asari are hideous and stupid and morally bankrupt, hmm? Why should anything be the same? Why should the old castes hold?”

“There are no castes in the greater galactic society, Jalosk. That is the batarian obsession.”

The captain paced slowly back and forth, working something over in her brain. When she spoke, she seemed surprised at the words pouring out of her own mouth. “You think? Then why did the elcor never have a place on the Council? Why do the batarians and the volus not have their own Pathfinders? Why did quarians get turned away at so many stations and harassed on the Citadel? Ah, you are a good elcor, Yorrik. Too good to understand anything about the world. There are always castes, Doctor. At least batarians have the decency to name them. Perhaps Kholai was right. All systems tend toward their worst possible conditions.”

“It will be the same in Andromeda,” Jalosk mumbled. “Humans, asari, salarians and turians up here, then drell, elcor and hanar in the middle, batarians and volus on the bottom, and quarians where everyone else sees fit to stick them once they’ve seen to every single one of their own needs.” He began to giggle again. The giggle turned into panting, then wheezing. “And blue running lights full of feel… feel… feelings to enslave us all.”

The sores on his neck burst in a spray of fine, dry dust that hit the iso-field, sizzled, and vanished.

The captain knelt next to the glass, as close as she could to Jalosk’s iso-chamber. She leaned her head against it and spread her fingers against the cool barrier.

“No, my poor, poor soul. It will be different. It will be better. It has to be. That’s why we came. For something new.” Her gaze lifted past the ruin of the batarian’s dying body, past the medbay, into the stars. She hardly saw him now, Yorrik or Ysses or Jalosk or any of them. She saw something so much bigger. “You may not see it. I may not see it. But Andromeda will be beautiful. I swear it to you on your death.”

The batarian spluttered and gagged. He clawed miserably at the shimmer of the iso-shield. “The only peace in the universe is entropy. I will see you at the end of all things, sister.”

A few hours later, the madness began.

Jalosk Dal’Virra’s four black eyes filled with blood. He began to scream, to spit, consumed by gibberish and rage, bellowing, throwing himself over and over at the forcefield, using profanity Yorrik had never dreamed of. The batarian clawed at the invisible barrier between him and his doctor, kicked it, punched it, at one point even tried to tear at it with his teeth. He foamed at the mouth, sobbed, leaked from every orifice, and all the while his fury never stopped, his absolute need to tear the elcor he had only just before called good and kind to shreds.

Yorrik watched without moving. He was stunned, and sorry, but he could do nothing as the batarian died raving and shrieking in front of him.

The awful noise seemed to finally rouse the hanar. Ysses floated to the elcor’s side and joined him in staring at the ruined corpse in numb horror.

“He looks so pretty,” said Ysses after a long quiet. “This one could look at him for hours.” Yorrik turned to gawp at his lab partner. “And you smell wonderful, Yorrik! Like flowers.”

“I should go,” whispered Qetsi’Olam.

11. MUTATION

Hello… everyone. This is your captain speaking. Please remain calm and return to your respective environmental control zones. There is not enough acclimatization equipment for everyone, and we must conserve the supplies we have. While person-to-person comms are offline at the moment, the public address system is still operable. However, its use should be restricted to emergencies only. This is an emergency. Now, if you can hear this, then you are awake, and if you are awake, you must have figured out by now that something has gone very, very wrong on our little ark. Really, rather a lot of things.

The acrid smell of weapons’ discharge hung over the cargo bay as the captain’s words boomed out through the cavernous space.

Containers spilled their contents everywhere. The hold stretched out in every direction and in every direction was destruction and chaos. Groups of containers had been dragged together to form makeshift blinds and shelters and forts. It looked like a tent city down there. Anax Therion crouched behind an unmolested shipping crate, where she’d been crouching for hours now, her knees throbbing, her eyes smarting with the smoke. She could just make out the squat, round shape of Irit Non several crates away, clutching a shotgun that had, until recently, belonged to a completely unreasonable hanar. The drell had fallen asleep in her crouch several times, startled awake, and drifted off again. Her skin was beginning to itch inside the constricting volus suit.

A flurry of gunfire blasted past Anax’s crate. She took a deep breath, swept round, fired back through the wreckage, and returned to her holding position. She could hear Irit swearing, repeating the same thing she’d been saying over and over for hours now, as though saying it again would produce an answer out of thin air. What the fuck is going on? Why are they shooting at us? Someone’s plasma bolt had sliced through the thigh of the volus’s suit. A protective bubble had immediately encased the exposed area while nanobots began to repair the mesh, but the bubble was bulky and it slowed her down.

From the labyrinth of luggage, a garbled voice arose. There was a great deal of swearing in this voice, and at the very least the words overcharge, overheat, and you said you knew how to use these things.